Creating the visual effects for ‘Animal World,’ coming soon to Netflix
BEIJING: After Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Incredibles 2, the third-highest-grossing film at the global box office last weekend was the effects-packed Chinese film Animal World.
Produced by Enlight Pictures and directed by Yan Han (Go Away Mr Tumor), Animal World is based on Nobuyuki Fukumoto’s manga Ultimate Survivor Kaiji. (Fukumoto’s comic was previously adapted as a Japanese film, the 2009 production Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler, which also sparked a sequel in 2011.)
The film follows a a young man named Zheng Kaisi (Li Yifeng) who becomes trapped on a gambling ship operated by a menacing impresario (Michael Douglas) and is forced to take part in a violent game with lifeor-death stakes.
Netflix has already acquired worldwide rights to the film for all territories outside of China.
The production supervisor for the film is John Dietz, whose company Bangbang Productions oversaw the visual effects, which were produced by Weta Digital, Rising Sun Pictures, Fin Design + Effects, and The Monk Studios. For both Weta and Rising Sun, it’s the first time they’ve contributed to a major Chinese production aimed for the international market.
Wellington-based Weta delivered the film’s train scene, where the hero turns into a sword-wielding fighter clown and has to battle his way through creatures who ooze rainbowcoloured blood. In addition to the creatures, parts of the train and much of the city were digitally generated visual effects.
Adelaide-based Rising Sun Pictures delivered 86 visual effects shots, encompassing many different parts of the film, including a card-playing creature, a dream sequence, a car chase, and a moody hero shot of “Destiny,” the freighter-turned-floating-casino that serves as the film’s primary location. Those shots comprised seven key sequences in the film, amounting to nearly nine minutes of material that was either fully or nearly-fully computer generated.
In Rising Sun’s longest sequence — occupying more than 90 seconds of screen time — the dejected hero walks through a casino door and suddenly finds himself tumbling in space, falling through the clutches of a claw-like patch of clouds before landing in an ocean where he is attacked by giant sharks.
Everything in the shot was computer-generated except for the actor. “(Director) Yan Han wanted it to feel trippy and creepy at the same time,” said Rising Sun’s visual effects supervisor Malte Sarnes. “We went through many iterations with him and John Dietz. It was hard to get the tone just right, because it’s so subjective. It was the most challenging, and the most enjoyable, scene in the film.”
Added Kirby, “It was challenging in terms of physical space and the changing scale. A single camera move is sustained for the full 90 seconds as Kaisi passes through four crazy environments. We go from a corridor into space, into water, into a frozen droplet and back to the corridor.”